No More Learning

' It
is as though Nature spoke through him at all times in the mood that is
upon her when she is opening the apple-blossom or reddening the apple
or thickening the shadow of the boughs, and that the men and women of
his verse and of his stories are all the ministers of her mood.


IV

When I was a child I often heard my elders talking of an old turreted
house where an old great-uncle of mine lived, and of its gardens and
its long pond where there was an island with tame eagles; and one day
somebody read me some verses and said they made him think of that old
house where he had been very happy. The verses ran in my head for years
and became to me the best description of happiness in the world, and
I am not certain that I know a better even now. They were those first
dozen verses of _Golden Wings_ that begin--

'Midways of a walled garden
In the happy poplar land
Did an ancient castle stand,
With an old knight for a warden.

Many scarlet bricks there were
In its walls, and old grey stone;
Over which red apples shone
At the right time of the year.

On the bricks the green moss grew,
Yellow lichen on the stone,
Over which red apples shone;
Little war that castle knew. '

When William Morris describes a house of any kind, and makes his
description poetical, it is always, I think, some house that he would
have liked to have lived in, and I remember him saying about the time
when he was writing of that great house of the Wolfings, 'I decorate
modern houses for people, but the house that would please me would be
some great room where one talked to one's friends in one corner and eat
in another and slept in another and worked in another. ' Indeed all he
writes seems to me like the make-believe of a child who is remaking the
world, not always in the same way, but always after his own heart; and
so unlike all other modern writers he makes his poetry out of unending
pictures of a happiness that is often what a child might imagine, and
always a happiness that sets mind and body at ease. Now it is a picture
of some great room full of merriment, now of the wine-press, now of
the golden threshing-floor, now of an old mill among apple-trees, now
of cool water after the heat of the sun, now of some well-sheltered,
well-tilled place among woods or mountains, where men and women live
happily, knowing of nothing that is too far off or too great for the
affections. He has but one story to tell us, how some man or woman lost
and found again the happiness that is always half of the body; and
even when they are wandering from it, leaves must fall over them, and
flowers make fragrances about them, and warm winds fan them, and birds
sing to them, for being of Habundia's kin they must not forget the
shadow of her Green Tree even for a moment, and the waters of her Well
must be always wet upon their sandals. His poetry often wearies us as
the unbroken green of July wearies us, for there is something in us,
some bitterness because of the Fall it may be, that takes a little from
the sweetness of Eve's apple after the first mouthful; but he who did
all things gladly and easily, who never knew the curse of labour, found
it always as sweet as it was in Eve's mouth. All kinds of associations
have gathered about the pleasant things of the world and half taken the
pleasure out of them for the greater number of men, but he saw them as
when they came from the Divine Hand. I often see him in my mind as I
saw him once at Hammersmith holding up a glass of claret towards the
light and saying, 'Why do people say it is prosaic to get inspiration
out of wine? Is it not the sunlight and the sap in the leaves? Are not
grapes made by the sunlight and the sap?
'


V

In one of his little socialistic pamphlets he tells us how he sat
under an elm-tree and watched the starlings and thought of an old
horse and an old labourer that had passed him by, and of the men and
women he had seen in towns; and he wondered how all these had come to
be as they were. He saw that the starlings were beautiful and merry
and that men and the old horse they had subdued to their service were
ugly and miserable, and yet the starlings, he thought, were of one
kind whether there or in the south of England, and the ugly men and
women were of one kind with those whose nobility and beauty had moved
the ancient sculptors and poets to imagine the gods and the heroes
after the images of men. Then he began, he tells us, to meditate how
this great difference might be ended and a new life, which would
permit men to have beauty in common among them as the starlings have,
be built on the wrecks of the old life. In other words, his mind was
illuminated from within and lifted into prophecy in the full right
sense of the word, and he saw the natural things he was alone gifted
to see in their perfect form; and having that faith which is alone
worth having, for it includes all others, a sure knowledge established
in the constitution of his mind that perfect things are final things,
he announced that all he had seen would come to pass. I do not think
he troubled to understand books of economics, and Mr. Mackail says,
I think, that they vexed him and wearied him. He found it enough to
hold up, as it were, life as it is to-day beside his visions, and to
show how faded its colours were and how sapless it was. And if we had
not enough artistic feeling, enough feeling for the perfect that is,
to admit the authority of the vision; or enough faith to understand
that all that is imperfect passes away, he would not, as I think, have
argued with us in a serious spirit. Though I think that he never used
the kinds of words I use in writing of him, though I think he would
even have disliked a word like faith with its theological associations,
I am certain that he understood thoroughly, as all artists understand
a little, that the important things, the things we must believe in or
perish, are beyond argument. We can no more reason about them than
can the pigeon, come but lately from the egg, about the hawk whose
shadow makes it cower among the grass. His vision is true because it
is poetical, because we are a little happier when we are looking at
it; and he knew as Shelley knew by an act of faith that the economists
should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from the
vision of the world made perfect that is buried under all minds. The
early Christians were of the kin of the Wilderness and of the Dry Tree,
and they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he was of the kin of the Well
and of the Green Tree and he saw an Earthly Paradise.

He obeyed his vision when he tried to make first his own house, for he
was in this matter also like a child playing with the world, and then
houses of other people, places where one could live happily; and he
obeyed it when he wrote essays about the nature of happy work, and when
he spoke at street corners about the coming changes.

He knew clearly what he was doing towards the end, for he lived at a
time when poets and artists have begun again to carry the burdens that
priests and theologians took from them angrily some few hundred years
ago. His art was not more essentially religious than Rossetti's art,
but it was different, for Rossetti, drunken with natural beauty, saw
the supernatural beauty, the impossible beauty, in his frenzy, while he
being less intense and more tranquil would show us a beauty that would
wither if it did not set us at peace with natural things, and if we did
not believe that it existed always a little, and would some day exist
in its fulness. He may not have been, indeed he was not, among the
very greatest of the poets, but he was among the greatest of those who
prepare the last reconciliation when the Cross shall blossom with roses.